A politician writes…

A Conservative MP wrote the following in his column for The Guardian back in 2002:

The most real moment [in recent debates about hunting] was when I opened a letter from the kennel master of the Heythrop Hunt, based at Chipping Norton in my constituency:

“We are not cruel people, quite the opposite, and we have thirty-eight seasons of animal welfare at the heart of everything we do. With animals you have the heartache as well as the good times and we just cannot contemplate life without our hounds, horses and all that goes with them. Please do your best.”

And that’s what makes me really angry.

Just as we predicted at the time, the Hunting Act has not led to the destruction of “hounds, horses and all that goes with them”. And so the author of that article doesn’t need to be so angry.